The clearest image of telomerase structure to date has emerged

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team of U.S. scientists used cryoentherapy to determine the structure of telomerase at the highest resolution to date, according to a paper published on May 25. Given the close relationship between telomerase and cancer and aging, the discovery represents an important step towards the development of telomerase-related therapies.
to this day, scientists are not entirely sure of the true causes of aging and cancer, and the discovery of telomere function is believed to have opened the way to new anti-aging and cancer treatments. Telomeres are the "hat" structure at the end of a chromosome, similar to the plastic tip of a shoelace, which protects against chromosome "wear". Each time a cell divides, the telomeres become shorter until the cell stops dividing and dies. Telomerase, on the other, can avoid this by adding DNA to the ends of chromosomes. Academics believe that the rational use of the extraction of bio-telomerase technology, will unlock the mystery of human aging and cancer and other serious diseases.
the resolution of electron microscopes in the past can show the details of the microcosm, but because biological samples cannot withstand radiation damage from electron beams, it has been difficult to obtain high-resolution information about biological samples. Kathleen Collins, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues decided to use newer techniques to "uncover" telomerase. In conjunction with the resolution revolution of recent years, frozen electroscope technology is thought to have ushered in a new era of analytical biometric structures, and several pioneers of this technology have been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This time, the team used cryoentherapy to finalify the structure of human telomerase, the highest resolution telomerase image ever obtained by humans.
In a news and opinion paper accompanying the paper, Michael Stone, a scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that previous lack of telomerase structural data had hampered the progress of clinically regulated telomerase, but now researchers have finally obtained images of the molecule combined with its substrates at the subnomet scale. (Source: Science and Technology Daily Zhang Mengran)